Uh, yea when the coin has no real value to folks and is just a speculative bubble or a speculative hedge... thats what happens. Not my cup of tea at least. As I've said, I normally leave the altcoin stuff alone except for the rare novel idea, or someone pulling me in for an opinion in one way or another.
What happened with bitcoin was unique and non-replicable because it started its coin minting by generating zero-priced coins. So from zero price it could only go upwards, despite new coins being added to the monetary base (inflationary effect).
Bitcoin's inflation has hampered it much later in its life, like what's happening right now (3600 BTC x 650$ = 2.34mn USD required every day to keep price steady). This is the only barrier to the price getting to five digits right now.
Altcoins are different because they start with some expectation from the start. They have an initial value per coin that can't be kept steady. For example, we launch a coin today, 1000 coins are mined and it is listed in the exchange for 0.01... Second day we get to 2000 coins... so with the price being steady at 0.01, there is a +10 BTC requirement to absorb the new +1000 coins. Otherwise the price of all 2000 coins crumbles.
Even cryptonote-based coins have extremely bad inflation right now. Their price went up too fast and it wasn't sustainable given the inflation rate (so they crashed back down). Hundreds of BTCs per day are required just to keep CN-based coin prices steady. So real-life value and application cannot overcome the inflation issue. Investors simply don't have that type of money to throw in, every day. Nor can one wait 3-4 years for the inflation to get better and then buy. By that time the coin will be perceived as dead so there's no way one would seriously consider it. So it's a problem for altcoins on how to distribute the monetary base in a way that is fair, that does not kill the price (and the coin) through inflation and also preserves the PoW to future-proof levels.